A fossil, after all, is only created under precise circumstances, with the dinosaur dying in a place that could preserve its remains in rock. All rights reserved. The paleontologist believed that this new information further supported the theory that an asteroid . The 1960 Valdivia Chile earthquake was the most powerful ever recorded, estimated at magnitude 9.4 to 9.6. Until a few years ago, some researchers had suspected the last dinosaurs vanished thousands of years before the catastrophe. Robert DePalma reveals the Tanis site discoveries he couldn't talk about in Part One. Tanis is a rich fossil site that contains a bevy of marine creatures that apparently died in the immediate fallout of the asteroid impact, or the KT extinction. Subscribe to News from Science for full access to breaking news and analysis on research and science policy. Underneath a freshwater paddlefish skeleton, a mosasaur tooth appeared. These tables are not the same as raw data produced by the mass spectrometer named in the papers methods section, but DePalma noted the datas credibility had been verified by two outside researchers, paleontologist Neil Landman at the American Museum of Natural History and geochemist Kirk Cochran at Stony Brook University. The Chicxulub impact is believed to have triggered earthquakes estimated at magnitude 10 11.5,[1]:p.8 releasing up to 4000 times the energy of the Tohoku quake.Note 1 Co-author Mark Richards, a professor of earth sciences focusing on dynamic earth crust processes[16] suggests that the resulting seiche waves would have been approximately 10100m (33328ft) high in the Western Interior Seaway near Tanis[1]:p.8 and credibly, could have created the 10 11 m (33 36 feet) high water movements evidenced inland at the site; the time taken by the seismic waves to reach the region and cause earthquakes almost exactly matched the flight time of the microtektites found at the site. Gizmodo covered the research at the time. This directly applies to today. ", "Tanis exhibits a depositional scenario that was unusual in being highly conducive to exceptional (largely three dimensional) preservation of many articulated carcasses (Konservat-Lagersttte). The same day, Ahlberg tweeted that he and During submitted a complaint of potential research misconduct against DePalma and Phillip Manning, one of the papers co-authors, to the University of Manchester. The Hell Creek Formation was at this time very low-lying or partly submerged land at the northern end of the seaway, and the Chicxulub impact occurred in the shallow seas at the southern end, approximately 3,050km (1,900mi) from the site. Please make a tax-deductible gift today. Manning points out that all fossils described in the PNAS paper have been deposited in recognized collections and are available for other researchers to study. According to the Science article, During suspects that DePalma, eager to claim credit for the finding, wanted to scoop herand made up the data to stake his claim.. "No one is an expert on all of those subjects," he says, so it's going to take a few months for the research community to digest the findings and evaluate whether they support such extraordinary conclusions. [5] Analysis of early samples showed that the microtektites at Tanis were almost identical to those found at the Mexican impact site, and were likely to be primary deposits (directly from the impact) and not reworked (moved from their original location by later geological processes).[1]. [1]:p.8192 The river flowed Eastward (other than impact driven waves),[1]:p.8192 with inland being to the West; Tanis itself was therefore in an ancient river valley close to the Westward shore of the Interior Seaway. High-resolution x-rays revealed this paddlefish fossil from Tanis, a site in North Dakota, contained bits of glassy debris deposited shortly after the dinosaur-killing asteroid impact. Isaac Schultz. Published May 11, 2022 6:09PM (EDT) The deathbed created within an hour of the impact has been excavated at an unprecedented fossil site in North Dakota. The 112-mile Chicxulub crater, located on the Yucatn Peninsula, contains the same mineral iridium as the KT layer, and it's often cited as further proof that a giant asteroid was responsible for killing dinosaurs (perBoredom Therapy). A field assistant, Rudy Pascucci, left, and the paleontologist Robert DePalma, right, at DePalma's dig site. A A. Paleontologist Robert DePalma has done it again. That "disconnect" bothers Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. The study of these creatures is limited to the fossils they left behind and those provide an incomplete picture. Nicklas also indicates that "in 2012 we decided to try to find an academic paleontologist who had the necessary interest, time, and the ability to excavate the site A good friend of ours, Ronnie Frithiof, recommended Robert DePalma. [8] Following suspicions of manipulating data, a complained was lodged against DePalma with the University of Manchester. Some scientists question Robert DePalma's methods. DePalma's dinosaur study, published in Scientific Reports in December 2021, . It also proves that geology and paleontology is still a science of discovery, even in the 21 st Century." Using radiometric dating, stratigraphy, fossil pollen, index fossils, and a capping layer of iridium-rich clay, the research team laboriously determined in a previous study led by DePalma in 2019 that the Tanis site dated from precisely . Appropriate editorial action will be taken once this matter is resolved.. 2 / 4: Robert A. DePalma, a paleontologist at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History and a graduate student at the University of Kansas. We werent just near the KT boundary. Miami Dade does not have an operational mass spectrometer, suggesting McKinney would have had to perform the isotope analyses underlying the paper at another facility. In the early 1980s, the discovery of a clay layer rich in iridium, an element found in meteorites, at the very end of the rock record of the Cretaceous at sites around the world led researchers to link an asteroid to the End Cretaceous mass extinction. [20] The sediment appeared to have liquefied and covered the deposited biota, then quickly solidified, preserving much of the contents in three dimensions. "It saddens me that folks are so quick to knock a study," he says. From the size of the deposits beneath the flood debris, the Tanis River was a "deep and large" river with a point bar that was towards the larger size found in Hell's Creek, suggesting a river tens or hundreds of meters wide. We absolutely would not, and have not ever, fabricated data and/or samples to fit this or another teams results, he wrote in an email to Science. They had breathed in early debris that fell into water, in the seconds or minutes before death. . The plotted line graphs and figures in DePalmas paper contain numerous irregularities, During and Ahlberg claimincluding missing and duplicated data points and nonsensical error barssuggesting they were manually constructed, rather than produced by data analysis software. Both papers studied 66-million-year-old paddlefish jawbones and sturgeon fin spines from Tanis. Other geologists say they can't shake a sense of suspicion about DePalma himself, who, along with his Ph.D. work, is also a curator at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History in Wellington, Florida. While some lived near a river, lake, lagoon, or another place where sediment was found, many thrived in other habitats. If we've learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that we cannot wait for a crisis to respond. The CretaceousPaleogene ("K-Pg" or "K-T") extinction event around 66 million years ago wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs and many other species. A researcher claims that Robert DePalma published a faulty study in order to get ahead of her own work on the Tanis fossil site. Robert DePalma. There is considerable detail for times greater than hundreds of thousands of years either side of the event, and for certain kinds of change on either side of the K-Pg boundary layer. 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science. But there were other inconsistencies at the excavation site the fossils they found seemed out of place, with some skeletons located in vertical positions. Victoria Wicks: DePalma's name is listed first on the research article published in April last year, and he has been the primary spokesman on the story . Recognizing the unique nature of the site, Nicklas and Sula brought in Robert DePalma, a University of Kansas graduate student, to perform additional excavations. DePalma, now a Ph.D. student at the University of Manchester, vehemently denies any wrongdoing. This dinosaur, a giant reptilian, lived during the Early Cretaceous period in oceans. The exceptional nature of the findings and conclusions have led some scientists to await further scrutiny by the scientific community before agreeing that the discoveries at Tanis have been correctly understood. The nerds travel to the final day of the dinosaurs reign with paleontologist Robert DePalma and the legendary Tanis Site. Scientists believe they have been given an extraordinary view of the last day of the dinosaurs after they discovered the fossil of an animal they believe . Last month, During published a comment on PubPeer alleging that the data in DePalmas paper may be fabricated. With Gizmodos Molly Taft | Techmodo. DePalma has not made public the raw, machine-produced data underlying his analyses. Robert A. DePalma, a paleontologist at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History and a graduate student at the University of Kansas. Bottom right, a small fragment of a marine annemite shell found in the freshwater Tanis deposit. DePalma also acknowledged that the manual transcription process resulted in some regrettable instances in which data points drifted from the correct values, but none of these examples changed the overall geometry of the plotted lines or affected their interpretation. McKinneys non-digital data set, he says, is viable for research work and remains within normal tolerances for usage.. Although fish fossils are normally deposited horizontally, at Tanis, fish carcasses and tree trunks are preserved haphazardly, some in near vertical orientations, suggesting they were caught up in a large volume of mud and sand that was dumped nearly instantaneously. DePalma submitted his own paper to Scientific Reports in late August 2021, with an entirely different team of authors, including his Ph.D. supervisor at the University of Manchester, Phillip Manning. Artist's rendering of a large asteroid hitting Earth. [5] The original discoverers of the site (Rob Sula and Steve Nicklas), who worked the site for several years, recognized its scientific importance and offered it to DePalma as he had some previous experience with working on fish sites. Robert DePalma made headlines again in 2021 with the discovery of a leg from a Thescelosaurus dinosaur at Tanis, reported The Washington Post. But two months before Durings paper would be published, a paper came out in Scientific Reports reaching essentially the same conclusion, based on an entirely separate data set, Science reported. DePalma's team argues that as seismic waves from the distant impact reached Tanis minutes later, the shaking generated 10-meter waves that surged from the sea up the river valley, dumping sediment and both marine and freshwater organisms there. Point bars are common in mature or meandering streams. A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 378, Issue 6625. These include many rare and unique finds, which allow unprecedented examination of the direct effects of the impact on plants and animals alive at the time of the large impact some 3,000km (1,900mi) distant. His reputation suffered when, in 2015, he and his colleagues described a new genus of dinosaur named Dakotaraptor, found in a site close to Tanis. Now, Robert DePalma, a paleontologist at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History and a graduate student at the University of Kansas, claims to have unveiled an unprecedented time capsule of this . Notably, the powerful magnitude 9.0 9.1 Thoku earthquake in 2011, slower secondary waves traveled over 8,000km (5,000mi) in less than 30 minutes to cause seiches around 1.51.8m (4.95.9ft) high in Norway. Ahlberg shared her concerns. Its author, Douglas Preston, who learned of the find from DePalma in 2013, writes that DePalma's team found dinosaur bones caught up in the 1.3-meter-thick deposit, some so high in the sequence that DePalma suspects the carcasses were floating in the roiling water. In fact, there are probably dinosaur types that still remain unidentified, reported Smithsonian Magazine. It's at a North Dakota cattle ranch, some 2,000 miles (3,220 km) away. "His line between commercial and academic work is not as clean as it is for other people," says one geologist who asked not to be named. Her former collaborator Robert DePalma, whom she had listed as second author on the study, published a paper of his own in Scientific Reports reaching essentially the same conclusion, based on an entirely separate data set. Your tax-deductible contribution plays a critical role in sustaining this effort. Additional fossils, including this beautifully preserved fish tail, have been found at the Tanis site in North Dakota. More: Science Publisher Retracts 44 Papers for Being Utter Nonsense, We may earn a commission from links on this page. It could be just one factor in a series of environmental events that led to their extinction. If the data were generated in a stable isotope lab, that lab had a desktop computer that recorded results, he says, and they should still be available. Last modified on Fri 8 Apr 2022 11.20 EDT. This had initially been a seaway between separate continents, but it had narrowed in the late Cretaceous to become, in effect, a large inland extension to the Gulf of Mexico. ", A North Dakota Excavation Had One Paleontologist Rethinking The Dinosaurs' Extinction, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DePalma and his colleagues have been working at Tanis since 2012. [5] Secrecy about Tanis was maintained until disclosed by DePalma and co-author Jan Smit in two short summary papers presented in October 2017,[2][3] which remained the only public information before widespread media coverage of the full prepublication paper on 29 March 2019. "It's not just for paleo nerds. Of his discovery, DePalma said, "It's like finding the Holy Grail clutched in the . He has mined a fossil site in North Dakota secretly for . Part of the phenomenally fossil-rich Hell Creek Formation, Tanis sat on the shore of the ancient Western Interior Seaway some 65 million years ago. The x-rays revealed tiny bits of glass called spherulesremnants of the shower of molten rock that would have been thrown from the impact site and rained down around the world. Any water-borne waves would have arrived between 18 and 26 hours later,[1]:p.24 long after the microtektites had already fallen back to earth, and far too late to leave the geological record found at the site. Although they stopped short of saying the irregularities clearly point to fraud, mostbut not allsaid they are so concerning that DePalmas team must come up with the raw data behind its analyses if team members want to clear themselves. Dont yet have access? And, if they are not forthcoming, there are numerous precedents for the retraction of scholarly articles on that basis alone.. But the fossils also held clues to the season of the catastrophe, During found. DePalma holds the lease to the Tanis site, which sits on private land, and controls access to it. It comprises two layers with sand and silt grading (coarse sands at the bottom, finer silt/clay particles at the top). [1]:pg.11 Key findings were presented in two conference papers in October 2017. He says the reviewers for the higher-profile journal made requests that were unreasonable for a paper that simply outlines the discovery and initial analysis of Tanis. Melanie During suspects Robert DePalma wanted to claim credit for identifying the dinosaur-killing asteroids season of impact and fabricated data in order to be able to publish a paper before she did. Now, a different group of researchers is accusing the former group of faking their data; the journal that published the research has added an editors note to the paper saying the data is under review. It is truly a magnificent site surely one of the best sites ever found for telling just what happened on the day of the impact. Others defend DePalma, like his co-author, Mark Richards, a geophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley. In the caravan are microscopes . Dinosaurs continue to fascinate, even though they became extinct 65 million years ago. If we've learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that we cannot wait for a crisis to respond. Raw machine data are seldom supplied to end users (myself included) who contract for isotope analyses from a lab that does them., Cochran says DePalma erred in not including these data and their origins in his original manuscript, but the bottom line is that I have no reason to distrust the basic data or in any way believe that it was fabricated., Eiler disputes this. Dinosaurs have been dead for so long,'" DePalma told The Washington Post. [1]:figure S29 pg.53 In 2022, a partial mummified Thescelosaurus was unearthed here with its skin still intact.[7]. Their team successfully removed fossil field jackets that contained articulated sturgeons, paddlefish, and bowfins. After his excavations at the Tanis site in North Dakota unearthed a huge trove of fish fossils that were likely blasted by the asteroid impact . Ive done quite a few excavations by now, and this was the most phenomenal site Ive ever worked on, During says. Bde hans far och hans farfars bror var kirurger i Florida. [23], As of April 2019, several other papers were stated to be in preparation, with further papers anticipated by DePalma and co-authors, and some by visiting researchers.[24]. By Robert Sanders, Media relations | March 29, 2019. Top left, a shocked mineral from Tanis. Fragile remains spanning the layers of debris show that the site was laid down in a single event over a short timespan. "Outcrops like [this] are the reasons many of us are drawn to geology," says David Kring, a geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, who wasn't a member of the research team. Robert DePalma, a paleontologist at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History and a graduate student at the University of Kansas, works at a fossil site in North Dakota. [31][18], A BBC documentary on Tanis, titled Dinosaurs: The Final Day, with Sir David Attenborough, was broadcast on 15 April 2022. There was a fossil everywhere I turned., After she returned to Amsterdam, During asked DePalma to send her the samples she had dug up, mostly sturgeon fossils. "I've been asked, 'Why should we care about this? December 10, 2021 Source: . though Robert DePalma's love of the dead and buried was anything but . Earliest evidence of horseback riding found in eastern cowboys, Funding woes force 500 Women Scientists to scale back operations, Lawmakers offer contrasting views on how to compete with China in science, U.K. scientists hope to regain access to EU grants after Northern Ireland deal, Astronomers stumble in diplomatic push to protect the night sky, Satellites spoiling more and more Hubble images, Pablo Neruda was poisoned to death, a new forensic report suggests, Europes well-preserved bog bodies surrender their secrets, Teens leukemia goes into remission after experimental gene-editing therapy. Robert James DePalma, 71, a longtime Florida resident passed away Tuesday, May 12, 2020 at his residence in Fort Myers, FL. FAU's Robert DePalma, senior author and an adjunct professor in the Department of Geosciences, Charles E. Schmidt College of Science, and a doctoral student at the . The 2023 Complete Python Certification Bootcamp Bundle, What Is Carbon Capture? Proposed by Luis and Walter Alvarez, it is now widely accepted that the extinction was caused by a huge asteroid or bolide that impacted Earth in the shallow seas of the Gulf of Mexico, leaving behind the Chicxulub crater. Eighteen months before publication of the peer-reviewed PNAS paper in 2019[1] DePalma and his colleagues presented two conference papers on fossil finds at Tanis on 23 October 2017 at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. The paper cleared peer review at PNAS within about 4 months. Episode #52: Your Mother Was a Vetulicolian and Your Father Smelt of Elderberries with Henry Gee . [15][1]:p.8. By 2013, he was still studying the site, which he named "Tanis" after the ancient Egyptian city of the same name,[5] and had told only three close colleagues about it. Using the same formula, the Chicxulub earthquakes may have released up to 1412 times as much energy as the Chile event. Paleontologist Robert DePalma believes he has found evidence of the first minutes to hours of that catastrophic event. Astonishment, skepticism greet fossils claimed to record dinosaur-killing asteroid impact. Numerous famous fossils of plants and animals, including many types of dinosaur fossils, have been discovered there. Today, the layer of debris, ash and soot resulting from the asteroid strike is preserved in the Earth's sediment. His advisor suggested seeking a similar site, closer to the K-Pg boundary layer. Robert DePalma, fdd 12 oktober 1981, r en amerikansk paleontolog och kurator . Cochran says the format of the isotopic data does not appear unusual. Science and AAAS are working tirelessly to provide credible, evidence-based information on the latest scientific research and policy, with extensive free coverage of the pandemic. They've been presented at meetings in various ways with various associated extraordinary claims," a West Coast paleontologist said to The New Yorker. In December 2021, a team of paleontologists published data . Paleontologist accused of faking data in dino-killing asteroid paper. [20], Later discoveries included large primitive feathers 3040cm long with 3.5mm quills believed to come from large dinosaurs; broken remains from almost all known Hell Creek dinosaur groups, including some incredibly rare hatchling and intact egg with embryo fossils; fossil pterosaurs for which no other fossils exist at that time; drowned ant nests with ants inside and chambers filled with asteroid debris; and burrows of small mammals living at the site immediately after the impact. Robert DePalmashown here giving a talk at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Aprilpublished a paper in December 2021 showing the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs struck Earth in the spring. But just one dinosaur bone is discussed in the PNAS studyand it is mentioned in a supplement document rather than in the paper itself. If the team, led by Robert DePalma, a graduate student in paleontology at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, is correct, it has uncovered a record of apocalyptic destruction 3000 kilometers from Chicxulub. Page numbers in this section refer to those papers. Robert DePalma is a paleontologist who holds the lease to the Tanis site and controls access to it.. Both Landman and Cochran confirmed to Science they had reviewed the data supplied by DePalma in January, apparently following Scientific Reportss request for additional clarification on the issues raised by During and Ahlberg immediately after the papers publication. September 20, 2021. American, said in a 2019 tweet that the findings from the site "have met with a good deal of skepticism from the paleontology community." . Such a conclusion might provide the best evidence yet that at least some dinosaurs were alive to witness the asteroid impact.